Entropic doom: Ramleh live in Geneva

Much to my shame, until recently I didn’t know much about Ramleh.  I knew the name, of course, as anyone did who was familiar with the more obscure strands of post-industrial English underground music.  But while I was – and remain – a fan of artists like Whitehouse, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, Ramleh had always passed me by.  That name, however, had always intrigued me, its two harsh syllables hinting at a mix of violence and foreignness (it’s an alternative spelling of Ramla, a town in Israel).

I was more familiar with Ramleh mainman Gary Mundy’s work as guitarist with Breathless, a criminally underrated UK post-punk/dream pop outfit whose career I’ve tracked since I first heard their 1991 masterpiece Between Happiness and Heartache.  Mundy’s choppy, ecstatic guitar on that record and its 1999 follow-up Blue Moon are key elements of what I love about Breathless, along with the forlorn voice of singer Dominic Appleton.  But my knowledge of Ramleh’s music was mostly limited to their side of the 5LP box set retrospective of Mundy’s label Broken Flag, which I picked up in 2007 as the first of many Vinyl on Demand boxes I decided I couldn’t do without.

All that was to change the other week, as Ramleh landed at cave12 in Geneva for one of their infrequent live actions.  Although the group also exist as a three-piece rock band with the addition of a drummer, this concert was given under their power electronics incarnation, with Mundy on vocals and effects joined by long-time collaborator Anthony Di Franco on bass guitar and electronics.  As usual cave12 took a while to fill up, but was nicely full by the time the duo ambled onstage.

Over the course of the next 45 minutes or so, Ramleh presented a set alive with tooled-up danger, mangled feedback and prowling aggression.  For me the most striking thing about the gig was that, for all the group’s single-minded focus on noise, these were recognizably songs, with all the shapes, transitions and climaxes that we associate with songform.  Obsessively inspecting, clutching and discarding one or other of his two microphones, Mundy sang in tones that ranged from the pained to the unbearably sad, while distorting his voice and issuing sharp stabs of dissonance.  It was pretty much a given that his echo-laden vocals rarely formed themselves into recognizable words, but that hardly mattered when the overall effect was as dark and tragic as this.

Di Franco, for his part, began the gig in arresting fashion by conjuring harsh levels of noise from the cable-strewn analogue devices in front of him.  It wasn’t long, however, before he strapped on his bass and proceeded to coax synapse-shredding levels of feedback from it, routing the sounds back to his synths and treating them for maximum impact.  Yet Di Franco’s playing was always rhythmic and creative, with savage chordal patterns and splintering low-end runs contributing to the formidable intensity of the Ramleh sound.

My closest reference point for this music, of course, would be Whitehouse, whom I saw several times in both trio (William Bennett/Philip Best/Peter Sotos) and duo (Bennett/Best) configurations.  Mundy has readily acknowledged the debt owed to Whitehouse not only by Ramleh but by the whole power electronics genre, while Best has been an occasional member of Ramleh over the years.  But what Mundy and Di Franco amply demonstrated at cave12 was that the Ramleh project is quite different from both early (Come Org-era) and late (Susan Lawly-era) Whitehouse.  It’s much less performative, for one thing, with Mundy’s vocals and stage presence hinting at sadness and distress rather than any kind of confrontational attitude.  Ultimately there’s a kind of bewilderment about Ramleh, a sense that they’re experiencing feelings of doubt and confusion even as they generate such emotions via their music.

Meanwhile, a brief post-gig chat with the affable Di Franco alighted upon the word entropic as a valid descriptor of Ramleh’s music.  Speaking as someone who got a C in O-level physics, I understand entropy to be a measure of the irreversibility of a process towards a state of equilibrium.  Just as Peter Hammill sings in “Stranger Still” of how “nothing could be less strange in entropy”, so Ramleh music tends towards the entropic in the way its strangeness multiplies and accumulates over time.  In my online dictionary, the next entry after “entropic” is “entropic doom”, defined as “the result of the second law of thermodynamics in which the entropy of the universe steadily increases until thermal equilibrium is reached, energy is uniformly dispersed and no life exists.”  Searching for a genre in which to place Ramleh, this phrase strikes me as more fitting than the well-worn tropes of post-industrial and power electronics.  Ramleh are entropic doom.